On 25/04/2012, John Floren <j...@jfloren.net> wrote: > On Wed, Apr 25, 2012 at 1:30 PM, Strake <strake...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On 25/04/2012, John Floren <j...@jfloren.net> wrote: >>> There are 3 options: >>> >>> 1. Suck it up and use the 64-bit system that is available >>> 2. Write drivers for your hardware (this is the comedy option) >>> 3. Complain on 9fans for a while before eventually giving up (this is >>> the popular option) >> 4. Keep to Linux and curse the world in wrath. >> > > I forgot about #4. We almost all end up going with #4 at some point, > to a greater or lesser extent.
Alas, fame brings drivers. >> I'd shut up if no one _asked_ me about it, but some did. > > You still haven't clarified what exactly you want to do with your > 64-bit system, besides win dicksize wars. This is a major reason. Me: Yeah, well, mine is 2^32 +1 units long! Other: *Arithmetic Overflow* Curses! > Reasons for using a 64-bit > system include, for example, *needing* more than 4 GB of RAM. If you > want to do stuff like Ron and Nemo have done, where you stick your > entire filesystem in 64 GB of memory or so, then yeah it's important. > On the other hand, I've never had a Plan 9 system with more than 4 GB > of RAM, excepting our NIX test box, and everything has been fine--you > don't need a lot for this OS! Yes — the OS takes less, so the computations can have more. Anyhow, this is not my worry — I have only 4 GB. > Through the magic of compression, and other things like realizing that > you don't have to redraw the *entire* screen 60 times a second when > displaying a mostly-static desktop. > You just send the chunks that have > changed, *when* they change. And when watching full-screen video, or playing full-screen 3D games? Then it must redraw nearly the whole screen, nearly every frame. > I'm not that familiar with how the Plan 9 graphics system works, but > we're not talking about hardware vs software OpenGL. There is no > OpenGL to be had here. Not yet. It seems to be in the works: http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/todo/index.html > This is writing bits into a framebuffer and > having them appear on the screen. It's pretty damn fast to write > things to main memory. Yes, which works iff the video output is local. This I wrote in response to the idea that I make one machine a 64-bit devoted CPU server, which I doubt would be appropriate for my usage case and available hardware.
